The left loves to talk about how much America spends on the military compared to other countries, and how that money could be spent on welfare instead. It has become a meme that the U.S. military expenditure is higher than the next ten or fifteen number of countries combined. But these tweets and memes obscure a lot of nuances—quite naturally since comparing the budgets of several countries together can never be honestly assessed in a tweet or a meme.
The United States spends around 23 percent of the U.S. GDP on its welfare. Compare this to China. China’s GDP is smaller than ours, its population is more than four times larger, and it spends 10 percent of that smaller GDP on its citizens. The lower you go on the list compared with our enemies, the worst it goes. Russian welfare is 3 percent of its GDP, and Iran’s spending cannot be accurately estimated because at 40 to 50 percent inflation rate numbers have lost meaning.
The military spending of each country is another story. The United States spends around 3.5 percent of its GDP on the military. According to official numbers, China spends 1.7 percent, Russia 3.7 percent, and Iran nearly 7 percent. But these numbers don’t tell the entire story.
First, do we trust these official numbers? This new Axis of Evil word is as reliable Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
During the Cold War, Soviet defectors told us that our estimates were way off. The Soviet Union was spending half of its budget on its military, more than twice of what we had thought. Will you be surprised if we find out that China’s lying about how much it is spending on its military? To begin with, we know that the Chinese lie about their GDP. American economists who study the Chinese economy believe that China’s GDP is around one-third smaller than the official numbers. By that account, China’s military spending goes up to 2.5 percent—assuming that they are honest about how much they are spending on their military.
Second, our economy is designed much differently than the corrupt and centrally planned economies of our enemies. Russia and Iran make much of their money by selling oil and gas, while the U.S. government makes its money through taxation. China has a communist economy, so everyone, directly or indirectly, works for the state. In the United States, most American work in the private sector. So, while you can compare these numbers, we are talking apples and oranges here because we are judging those economies by the standards of our economic design.
Third, it is much more expensive for the U.S. military to do the same thing as our enemies. Out of everything that we spend on the military every year, nearly half of it goes into the compensation of our troops and their families. Our adversaries, on the other hand, don’t have to compete with the private sector the way we do to recruit troops. They all have conscriptions, while we got rid of the draft. For those who volunteer to join their militaries, because they are much poorer than we are, they have to pay much lower salaries. The same goes for the cost of procuring weapons. Buying a fighter jet from Lockheed Martin or a missile from Raytheon costs much more here than in China. On the one hand, labor costs are much higher. On the other hand, the president of the United States cannot put a gun on the head of the CEO of a company to get a discount, but the leader of China can—and practically does.
Fourth, the United States has a much more difficult task to do than China, Russia, and Iran. Building and maintaining are more expensive than destroying. The task of the U.S. military is to not only protect our national security, but build and maintain the global peace, while our enemies focus on destroying it. We must focus on several enemies—in addition to the ones mentioned, also consider North Korea and terrorists. All of them, on the other hand, are preparing to fight only one enemy: the United States.
But America doesn’t do this out of pure altruism. It does it because it serves the American people best. Imagine a world where China controlled Asia and Russia controlled Europe, the two continents that the United States exports most of its products to, and Iran also controlled the Middle East, where most of the world gets its energy from. At best, millions of American jobs would vanish, and the price of everything would go higher by many orders of magnitude because those countries would do everything they could to subjugate Americans and starve us—because they hate us, and they want to impose their way of life on us. That’s the “best” case scenario. Much likelier is that they would join forces to defeat us at a war they would start. No sane person would want to live in that world.
But why should the United States spend so much when our allies won’t? It is true that our allies should spend more than they do, but, even if they do, they are not capable of making a significant change to the balance of power because they are not nearly as rich as we are. But there could be a downside. Centuries are resentments still live in Europe and Asia—the Japanese and the South Koreans, both scared to death by China and North Korea, still cannot get over their past animosity to work together. The creation of NATO wasn’t just to defend Europe against the Soviet Union. Americans also didn’t trust the Europeans to have their own militaries for good reasons. Every time Europeans got armed, they went to war with each other. Every time, Americans paid a price for it. Can we trust them not to do it again? If you ask Europeans, they don’t trust themselves much. So why should we?
The American people should be proud of ourselves for we occupy a unique place in history. We are the only nation who has had the world’s strongest military but is extremely reluctant to use it. It’s easy for the leftists to point to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to say that American is a militarist nation, but compare that to Europeans’ and Asians’ histories with being armed. In America’s lifetime until the end of World War II, Europeans killed nearly a hundred million of each other. Asians hardly fared any better. Since Europeans disarmed, and America armed up until Russia attacked Ukraine, no European country went to war with another. This is no coincidence. And despite what progressives believe, humans did not suddenly become better because God didn’t suddenly reinvent us. It’s because America finally decided that the price of keeping the peace was worth it.
Would it be better if America spent less on its military and more on its own people? Sure, but only if world peace was preserved. But to believe that world peace without the might of the American military can be preserved relies on trusting the good faith of the China, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and terrorists, as well as trusting that a divine intervention sometime during the last few decades changed humanity for the better. I don’t think either is true. Rather, we, the American people, have altered the course of human history marked by brutality and mass killings. We have served humanity, but we also have served ourselves because, being the world’s largest economy, nobody has more to lose than we if World War III breaks out. It’s time to give ourselves some credit and once again be proud of what we have done.
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